


hotel complaints and grievances raised

by SafelyCapricious



Series: things you find in a graveyard [27]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 11:34:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21207857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: The fall air is crisp and refreshing. Around her, people huddle in their coats and scarves – Natasha hunkers down too, against a nonexistent wind, in order to blend it.She doesn’t think she’ll ever understand American’s inability to handle the cold – and she is using the term cold loosely here as it isn’t even below sixteen celsius.





	hotel complaints and grievances raised

**Author's Note:**

> Title generated by the [Hozier random fanfic title generator](http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=22501), which is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
> 
> I'm almost a human again, please believe in me. Like a fairy I need people to clap in order to survive, or something, I never quite understood that. In any case! Fictober is 87.096774193% done, holy crap. 
> 
> This is just kinda pointless pre relationship fluff. I wanna write more 2012 Avengers fic, so maybe this'll turn into something longer some day. Enjoy!

The fall air is crisp and refreshing. Around her, people huddle in their coats and scarves – she hunkers down too, against a nonexistent wind, in order to blend it.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever understand American’s inability to handle the cold – and she is using the term cold loosely here as it isn’t even below sixteen celsius.

She doesn’t even have much of a reason to try to blend in, either, to be fair. It’s more habit that keeps her concealing herself than anything else. The same habit that has her casting the tower from a nearby vantage as she ties her shoe before going in.

That is, naturally, when she spots him. 

Not that he isn’t doing a fairly good job to blend in — which he is. Just not as good as her. But even still, from what she knows of the Winter Soldier, it doesn’t make much sense for him to be good at blending in — Hydra seems to have mainly used him as a hammer, with the solution always being murder. Not much use, then, in slinking about and doing reconnaissance. 

Maybe, then, this is the Bucky Barnes that Steve has been searching for. 

Natasha isn’t sure that the second World War offered many chances for surveillance of this type either, but he was a person then and not a weapon. 

She knows what it is to be a tool. 

She follows him in a winding path. He’s staying close to the tower, so she stops for a coffee from one of the stands, and admires the Halloween decorations that decorate the outside of the tower and keeps him in her periphery. 

After fifteen minutes she moves just a tad too sharply and — there, now he’s seen her. She meets his eyes and raises her cup of coffee and gets to watch him consider bolting. 

But he doesn’t. So she slowly makes her way to him, her meandering path seeming to do nothing but stress him as he becomes tenser and tenser until she’s beside him and holding out the second coffee. 

“Black, no cream or sugar, because I wasn’t sure you’d managed to develop an opinion about coffee yet and don’t want to unduly influence you. This is probably terrible though,” she says with a smile as he takes it. 

His gloves, at least, make sense to her. It’s camouflage, not him saying it’s cold. He’s not actually wearing enough layers, apart from the gloves, to blend in. This close she can see how thin the cloth he’s wearing is. 

She gives a dramatic shiver and rubs her arms and he grimaces at her.

“It’s not cold,” he says and she grins back. 

“Everyone else thinks it is, so you should too. More layers, Kotik, if you want to blend in.” He twitches so badly at the pet name that some of his coffee escapes, despite the lid, and splashes his glove. 

“Don’t call me that,” he says, and she ignores him, taking a sip of her coffee and admiring the animatronic spider that is crawling up the outside of the tower. 

“You want to be careful, going for homeless chic here would be a bad choice for example. Stark has a bit of a…complex and you’re likely to find yourself shuffled off to some lovely little shelter with classes and things. And you have to be careful about it elsewhere too — and you’ll have to do a little more grooming, no offense, before going to high class. But you should have at least another jacket and a scarf. I suppose you could go full frat bro and wear shorts and sandals, but that usually draws a little more attention then I think you want.”

He’s straight up staring at her now, and she takes the chance to loop her arm though his. He stiffens but doesn’t pull away. 

“Good talk. You ready to face America’s Sweetheart, or do you want to do some shots first, Zaichik?”

“That is,” he says, blinking at her with his very pretty eyes, “not any better than Kotik.” 

She laughs and tugs, and he moves. She tosses her empty coffee in the trash, and then takes his, completely untouched, from his hand and starts to drink that as well. “Got it, a new coat and scarf, some shots, then we brave the tower, yes?”

He doesn’t respond, but he hasn’t shaken her off yet, so she’ll take it as a good sign. 

“Come along Soldat,” she says and drags him towards one of the stupidly over priced shops in the area. 

“I like that better,” he says as he follows, and she tries to shake off the itch of familiarity.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me [on tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/capriciouswrites), I love talking and require validation from strangers. Comments are also good.
> 
> I definitely ship BuckyNat, though this is pretty unshippy, so I hope that's cool. Oh! Google'd some pet names here, so Kotik is, theoretically, male kitten and Zaichik is male baby bunny. This was from someone's post about pet names so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Soldat is soldier, or, well, the phonetic spelling as in Cyrillic it's spelled солдат but I figured Soldat would at least be visually similar enough for English speaking audience so...if I super messed any of that up let me know. Okay, thanks, love love.


End file.
